Abstract
The focus of the article is the research medical article, which is the academic genre heavyweight and whose structure serves as the mainframe of all other genre forms. One of its most important characteristics, playing at the same time a significant role in the field of discourse, are shell nouns. The latter are such a category of tokens, which with their schematic semantic structure, take reference meaning from the context. Shell words are convenient for the process of naming, as they first come to mind in an onomasiological task. The study is based on an analysis of two large corpora of research medical articles from prestigious Bulgarian and English-language publications, respectively. The article compares the use at semantic-syntactic level of the most common shell nouns in the studied corpora. As is to be expected, the most frequently used shell words belong to the so-called “mental” class. The word “analysis” is used most often in both corpora with “method” in the English corpus and “moment” in the Bulgarian corpus taking second place, respectively. Understanding the importance of the role of shell nouns in scientific medical texts has to do not only with hedging, but also with the semantics of the relation abstract-concrete, the indicators of cohesion and coherence, allowing to study the textual construction in the light of theme and rheme relations.
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